Inside Yingli, the giant Chinese solar company sponsoring the World Cup

It takes about two hours by car from the Chinese capital Beijing to get to the smog-blanketed city of Baoding. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s nothing much to speak of, typical of the Northeast’s expanse of industrial wastelands, threaded together by super-highways.

So we were surprised to find that Baoding — where air pollution registers at hazardous levels for more than a quarter of the year — was also home to the sprawling campus of the world’s top solar panel manufacturer, Yingli. We had landed, it seemed, in the very epicenter of China’s cleantech revolution. After weeks of negotiations, my colleague Jaeah Lee and I were finally granted access to film this exclusive footage at Yingli’s headquarters in the fall of 2013. What awaited inside blew our socks off: acres of high-tech solar wizardry attended to by an impressive fleet of skilled workers, and an understandably boastful management.

In the video above, we take you behind-the-scenes of Yingli, and put a face to the name you’ve been seeing in the background of World Cup games: In 2010, Yingli became the first renewable energy company, and the first Chinese company, to partner with the tournament.